ORLANDO, Fla. – If all goes as planned, the F-35 joint strike fighter will be fielded by three US services and at least 11 international customers, all running missions together around the globe.
But this major advantage of interoperability and partnership can create headaches when trying to link up training simulators from the various militaries.
Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, the head of the F-35 joint program office (JPO), outlined the challenges to Defense News in an exclusive interview at the I/ITSEC conference here.
"The issue is not that we don't have the technology to do that," Bogdan said. "It's just that the networks on which the services ride all their other simulators are different."
Just inside the US, Bogdan pointed out, the Marines, Navy and Air Force all run simulators on different back ends that have serious difficulty talking to each other. That problem is big enough that the Defense Department is launching an initiative to find solutions across the services.
"We have to figure out how to connect those together," Bogdan said. "It's not hard to do but the question is, what are the standards for connecting them together? And that requires coordination among the services and OSD to figure that out."
The JPO has funding for commonality and integration across training systems, but it is hard for Bogdan to figure out how to use that money until there is more clarity on how the simulators would connect. Those discussions inside the JPO are relatively new, in large part because regular work on the simulators only started in the last year.
While trying to figure out how to connect the US services, Bogdan also has to deal with synching up an international customer base — an entirely different challenge thanks to the multilevel security required.
"If you have a partner that wants to connect to a US service training network, and he wants to link into that, that might be easy," Bogdan said. But the real challenge is what the partner nation may be connected to on the other side.
For example: If Turkey wants to sync up its simulators to work with US aircraft, the F-35A simulators should be able to talk to each other from a technological perspective. But the Turkish system could also be connected to a larger Turkish military server, which in turn is connected to another set of servers that connects with a government that should not have access to the F-35 data.
"You need to worry about that boundary," Bogdan explained. "We don't have a problem with connecting a partner's F-35 enterprise with the bigger F-35 enterprise. It's on the back end of that, what is the partner's enterprise connecting to, and you want to make sure you protect that."
Doing so could require a unique set of rules for each partner nation, and Bogdan said the JPO is ready to support that. However, the rules would have to come from a different part of the Pentagon.
"That is a creation of a standard or requirement, and that is not what we do," he said. "I don't want to get into that business other than to advise those people making the standards how hard or easy their solution will be." ■
Email: amehta@defensenews.com.
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